The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and LiteratureMcAfee, Cleland Boyd
Religion
The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and Literature
McAfee, Cleland Boyd
Bible -- History; Bible -- Influence; Bible and literature; Bible. English -- Versions -- Authorized
even as they also are earning their payment for their work? On the whole,
then, I am in favor of reading the Bible, with such grammatical,
geographical, and historical explanations by a lay teacher as may be
needful, with rigid exclusion of any further theological teaching than
that contained in the Bible itself." Mr. Huxley is an Englishman, though,
as Professor Moulton says, "We divide him between England and America."
But Professor Moulton himself is very urgent in this same matter. If the
classics of Greece and Rome are in the nature of ancestral literature, an
equal position belongs to the literature of the Bible. "If our intellect
and imagination have been formed by Greece, have we not in similar fashion
drawn our moral and emotional training from Hebrew thought?" It is one of
the curiosities of our civilization that we are content to go for our
liberal education to literatures which morally are at opposite poles from
ourselves; literatures in which the most exalted tone is often an
apotheosis of the sensuous, which degrade divinity, not only to the human
level, but to the lowest level of humanity. "It is surely good that our
youth during the formative period should have displayed to them, in a
literary dress as brilliant as that of Greek literature, a people
dominated by an utter passion for righteousness, a people whose ideas of
purity, of infinite good, of universal order, of faith in the irresistible
downfall of moral evil, moved to a poetic passion as fervid and speech as
musical as when Sappho sang of love or Eschylus thundered his deep notes
of destiny."[58]
But there is a leading American voice which will speak in that behalf, in
President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia University. In his address
as President of the National Educational Association, President Butler
makes strong plea for the reading of the Bible even in public schools.
"His reason had no connection with religion. It was based on altogether
different ground. He regarded an acquaintance with the Bible as absolutely
indispensable to the proper understanding of English literature." It is
unfortunate in the extreme, he thought, that so many young men are growing
up without that knowledge of the Bible which every one must have if he
means to be capable of the greatest literary pleasure and appreciation of
the literature of his own people. Not only the allusions, but the whole
tone and bias of many English authors will become to one who is ignorant
of the Bible most difficult and even impossible of comprehension.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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